Obamacare: Hurry up and wait

President Barack Obama told Americans Tuesday that heavy demand for access to his signature health insurance exchanges was to blame for snags in signing up online — even as he asked uninsured consumers, five times in one statement, to add to the traffic by visiting www.healthcare.gov to buy coverage.

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The mixed message, delivered in the Rose Garden Tuesday afternoon, reflected twin needs. Obama had to fight the quickly gathering narrative that Opening Day for Obamacare looked like a bust, and he wanted to make sure that consumers who are eligible know how they can enroll over the next six months.

“Like every new law, every new product roll out, there are going to be some glitches in the signup process along the way that we will fix,” he said.

By mid-afternoon, the Department of Health and Human Services reported that 2.8 million unique visitors had been to the Website, though there were no statistics available for how many were actually able to enroll. Some users experienced long waiting periods, and others ran into impediments that likely had little to do with the volume of traffic. For example, the drop-down boxes on the federal Website weren’t working for much of the day, preventing users from answering security questions and establishing accounts.

But HHS, which cited figures of 81,000 consumers calling the department’s toll-free number to sign up and another 60,000 requesting help through online chats, celebrated the fact that the health insurance marketplaces at the heart of Obamacare were in fact open for business Tuesday.

“Applications and enrollment in the state-based and federally-facilitated marketplaces have been completed,” HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters said, “and on this historic day, enrollment for 2014 has begun.”

The truth is that the success or failure of the exchanges won’t be known for some time. The millions of Americans who will get subsidies for insurance that they couldn’t otherwise afford won’t begin receiving benefits until January — and they have through March to sign up in the open enrollment window.

It may have been a rough first day, but like a vaunted baseball club losing a hotly contested first game of the season, Team Obama has plenty of time to show that its exchanges will work.

Whatever the reason — failure to build good technology or failure to account for the number of website visitors — the rollout was full of kinks.